I don't know if this is well known but I have successfully got a fully bootable OS onto a USB stick. My hetbook has NO HDD or SSD in it as ths SSD died a few months ago. It had PCLinuxOS 2009 on it but I lost my fav' OS in the crunch.

If it is common knowledge the I await the flak...

NOTE:- This is not a live "CD" version but a fully operational OS that is set up for my netbook on an old 16GB USB memory stick.

It was _seriously_ NOT an eay task at first but now I know how to do it, it is relatively straightforward.

I now have a fully functional SSDless and HDDless netbook again ready for proper work...

Depends what you mean.
I had AROS installed on an SD card on my AA1, dual boot with Ubuntu, until I decided to wipe the SSD and install it as the main OS.
It is quite easy to install Ubuntu, for example, onto an SD card, not tried it to USB (except as a Live USB install).

The sig between the asterisks is so cool that only REALLY COOL people can even see it!

I am delighted for you that this has worked, but just felt the need to warn you about the possible short life of a USB flash drive full installation, due to the multitude of disk writes that may be going on while using the system.

Maybe you need to ensure that swap is setup differently to normal, and also that your system partitions are mounted appropriately for a flash drive.

Unfortunately I don't know what exactly is needed for that; I just thought it worth flagging up the possibilities.

I am well aware of the flaws involved with USB sticks and also the data rates...

As my USB drive is already old and will be mainly used in AMIGA emulation mode I am not to worried about life. The genuine SSD in this machine barely lasted 2.5 years before absolute failure, and these are designed for the job. USB sticks make the machine fully usable again, plus it was fun to work out.

PCLinuxOS 2009 fully working along with E-UAE autorunning into E-UAE...

Latest AROS still twitchy and unstable for me and would not install to a brand new 8GB USB stick. I kept getting R/W errors then locking up in a loop as I tried to exit the install. The same occured with my spare 4GB stick which HAD a live PCLinuxOS on it that gave no errors at all in that mode... I tried both FFS and SFS file formats but to no avail...